SWAT4HCLS 2025 Biohackathon

Overview

SWAT4HCLS (Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Health Care and Life Sciences) is an annual conference at the intersection of semantic web technologies and biomedical research. Each year, the conference includes a dedicated Biohackathon track — a collaborative working session that runs in parallel with the main conference and continues with a dedicated full day afterwards.

I participated in the SWAT4HCLS 2025 Biohackathon in Barcelona, Spain, picking up a thread started at the SWAT4HCLS 2024 Biohackathon on the use of a lightweight upper-level ontology for representing clinical concepts.

Projects

Applying SULO to SPHN Concepts

The Simplified Upper Level Ontology (SULO) is a lightweight upper ontology that provides a minimal set of top-level categories and relations for representing clinical concepts. Rather than adopting a heavyweight foundational ontology such as BFO or DOLCE in full, SULO offers a pragmatic middle ground — preserving key ontological distinctions (such as between continuants and occurrents, or between material entities and information artifacts) in a tractable form that can be implemented directly in OWL, without burdening domain experts with excessive philosophical abstraction.

The project focused on applying SULO to a selection of SPHN concepts from the SPHN RDF Schema to evaluate the feasibility and value of grounding SPHN's domain model within an upper ontology.